Inria Chile continues its development in South America. In recent years, with Claude Puech at the helm, she has strengthened her network of contacts and has set up partnerships with investment structures to accelerate the creation of strategies in Chile. Appointed on September 1st as Director, Nayat Sanchez Pi intends to pursue this strategy and implement an ambitious settlement project that includes opening to French partners, the revitalization of the transfer policy and the establishment of a sustainable economic model.

Thirty years ago, the Web was set up to meet an ever-growing need to organise and access information. As a founding member for Europe of the W3C, Inria take a look back at the birth of the Web as both a research subject and a tool, assessing the problems that continue to be raised.

Capitalizing on five years of research-collaboration success, Mitacs and Inria renewed their partnership originally signed in 2014. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) supports two-way international research opportunities for graduate researchers at Canadian universities and at eight Inria Research Centres in France.

The CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) and Inria have awarded the 2017 "privacy protection" Prize to a European research team. During the 11th international conference Computers Privacy and Data Protection
(CPDP) to Seda GÜRSES, Carmela TRONCOSO and Claudia DIAZ for their article « Engineering privacy by design reloaded
».

The CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication) and Software Heritage have announced their collaboration beginning early 2018: it will enable the data repository in HAL to be extended to software and, as a result, contribute to the recognition of the work of research software developers.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

InriaSoft aims for the durable development of large-scale software programs by bringing together their user communities within consortia that will finance a team of engineers tasked with their maintenance and evolution. The InriaSoft headquarters are based in Rennes, as Claude Labit, director, and David Margery, technical director of this national action backed by the Fondation Inria, explain.

The unexpected avenues of technology transfer with Matrix Lead

We sometimes have to accept making detours in order to find a new, promising transfer opportunity. The spreadsheet verification project, winner of an ERC Proof of Concept grant from the European Research Council, is proof of this. Meeting with Xavier Rival, head of the Antique project team - where it all began.

Our objective was to work on data structures within - to begin with - the relatively classic framework of operating systems or embedded programs

The emergence of a new opportunity

At the heart of this research, one encounter was to open up new possibilities. When Tie Cheng suggested coming to do an internship in the Antique team, Xavier Rival was immediately intrigued by his atypical profile - combining both experience in the private sector and research. “As he was specifically interested in spreadsheets, I suggested he work on their verification”, he continues.“Everybody knows Excel, and the prejudice would be to consider it as office software with no scientific interest.And yet, a single error can have serious consequences. For example, I think of the paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" written by two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which establishes a strong link between public debt and growth. Moreover, their conclusions were able to be used to justify the austerity policies during the crisis of 2008. However, their proof was based on programming errors in the spreadsheets which, once corrected, come to a quite different conclusion...”

And so, thanks to this encounter, the research framework of the ERC grant was enriched with this new dimension on the verification of spreadsheets which, as it progressed, gave a glimpse of transfer opportunities. After defending his thesis in 2015, Tie Cheng created a start-up, Matrix Lead, and the project received the ERC Proof of Concept grant of 150,000 Euros to develop its structure.

Being part of the long term

It is now time to recruit cutting-edge engineers to make this tool - originally very complex - the most easy to use. The challenge is also to start working with the first potential clients and refine its properties and functionalities. However, as Xavier Rival reminds us: “The verification of programs is complex and takes a lot of time. The transition from science to transfer cannot be done in a year. For example, the transfer of the Astréeanalyser, designed and developed within the team since 2001, could only be envisaged in 2007, and the project found its cruising speed with a tool used industrially in 2010. In our fields, we therefore need to have this long-term option. That is precisely what a grant like the ERC Proof of Concept enables us to do.”

Do you want to apply for an ERC Proof of Concept grant?

Les conseils de Xavier Rival

As it is not possible to apply for the ERC Proof of Concept grant without the prerequisite ERC grant, Xavier Rival recommends first and foremost to:“prepare your project well and plan it over the long term. You really need to be ready to do it because it involves very extensive work over five years.”Something which is notably made possible within the Inria research teams: “In fact, the way our research is organised enables us to move towards long-term projects, to take on a subject that is dear to us, to develop it and to feel ready to apply when the time is right.”

Xavier Rival adds a second piece of advice, inspired by his work with Tie Cheng: “once your main research strategy has been defined, don't be scared of making a few detours. Some opportunities that are found slightly 'off-piste' can become very promising later on. There again, a structure like Inria enables us to remain open to these sometimes unexpected avenues.”